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Oct. 7, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:43
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs :
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Sorry about that.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment on why the lack of a two-state solution is what threatens Israel the most.
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Professor Sachs, my dear friend, welcome back to the show.
It's always a pleasure and a privilege to be able to pick your brain.
You have a fascinating, fascinating piece out called It is the Lack of a Two-State Solution That Most Threatens Israel, and I want to explore that piece with you in some detail.
But before we do, just some big picture questions for you.
How has the landscape of the Middle East changed in the past year since October 7th, 2023?
Yeah.
It's been a very bloody year.
We don't know how many Palestinians have died from October 8, 2023 until today.
But we know that it is an astounding number, 40,000 counted as dead, perhaps 200,000 actually dead as a result of Israel's incursion into Israel.
the Hamas terrorists, as they were taking Israeli hostages.
So Israel killed, we know, a lot of its own people that day as well.
But afterwards, Netanyahu carried out his longtime strategy.
It's been his strategy for decades.
His strategy is that with any provocation, whatever its cause, whatever...
This is a doctrine that he's laid out in books, in speeches, in testimony to the US Congress.
Always respond with massive, brutal force, murderous force.
To get the other side to back down.
And Netanyahu's idea has been, all along, no need to compromise with anybody.
Israel defends its own proposition if it's going to keep all of the land of the occupied territories that it gained in the 1967 war, which he believes should be done.
It's going to do it not through negotiation, but essentially by military dominance and by mass killing if necessary, but especially by this mass deterrence that comes from crushing any foe that gets in Israel's way.
It leads to lots of deaths, but it actually doesn't solve any problem at all.
Israel is less safe today, by far, than a year ago, despite 40,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 Palestinians dead, despite tens of thousands of women and children completely innocent in this, dead, murdered by the Israeli defense forces.
The indiscriminate and utterly, or even discriminant, cruel bombing of apartment buildings, hospitals, clinics, schools.
It's been horrendous.
Now Netanyahu faces the reality that Israel is with many foes that are demanding a fundamental political change.
We'll get to what that is.
but they do not accept Israel's control over the occupied Palestinian lands.
And so the fight is not only with the Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, but now with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
So there's a full war underway to Israel's north.
And the backers of Hamas and Hezbollah have been many...
And so Netanyahu, according to his doctrine, needs not only to crush the Palestinians, to crush Hamas, to crush Hezbollah, Houthi fighters in Yemen also supported by outside forces, including Iran, but also to crush Iran.
But again, there's one big problem.
Israel can't do it.
It doesn't have the means to do it.
It's a lot of deaths, a lot of bombing, a lot of violence, a lot of destruction, a lot of assassinations, a lot of hate, but it is not crushing.
Now, I think Netanyahu knows this and his plan all along.
And this goes back decades.
This doesn't go back to October 7, 2023.
This goes back decades.
Netanyahu's plan is to get the United States to do the crushing.
Netanyahu already, more than 20 years ago, wanted the United States.
To crush all of Israel's foes in the Middle East.
The war in Iraq in 2003 was strongly promoted by Netanyahu in his speeches, congressional testimony, his actions as foreign minister under Ariel Sharon as prime minister at that time.
He wanted a war by the United States.
Against Saddam Hussein for Israel's sake.
But the idea was it wouldn't just be taking out Iraq.
As he said in his congressional testimony, you take out Afghanistan, that makes it easier to take out Iraq.
You take out Iraq, that makes it easier to take out the next one, he said.
He didn't name the next one, but we know that it was Syria and Iran.
So Netanyahu's been after the United States to engage in a full-fledged Middle East war for more than 20 years.
It's not, again, the dramatic event of October 7, 2023.
this is a long-term strategy.
We have a difficult time in our public discourse these days, especially in our mainstream media, because of official narratives of So we give the date of October 7 as the start of the Middle East crisis, though it's been in crisis for 100 years.
We give February 24, 2022 as the start of the war in Ukraine, even though the actual war was going on for 10 years.
but we make narratives.
And my point is No.
Israel has been promoting that the United States should be in a regional war for more than 20 years.
Netanyahu viewed 9-11, the attack on the United States, as the opportunity to trigger a series of wars.
And he actively promoted that.
He said it.
It's not even hidden from view.
It's in congressional testimony that he gave in 2002.
We're in that same story today, but Judge, the problem for Israel is the other side, which demands Palestinian rights, which demands that Israel not go on war rampages around the region or drag the U.S. into war around the region, It's getting stronger over time.
Iran is a lot stronger than it was 20 years ago.
Let me stop you for a minute and ask you to go into your field of specialty, which is economics.
How much stronger or weaker economically?
Much weaker.
And for a basic point that one can easily look at, Israel's been downgraded twice now in its credit ratings.
Its credit rating is just hovering at the investment grade right now.
When it was most recently downgraded just a few weeks ago, the downgrade said the likelihood of further Downgrades is very real.
In other words, in the normal jargon, Israel will hit junk bond status in the vernacular.
Junk bond status.
Well, that's a devastating place to be for a modern economy.
And that means the pain will be very serious.
Who's going to invest right now in Israel?
Who's going as tourists?
You've got the economy basically diverted, as they say, from butter to guns.
What that literally means is that people who are normally at work but on Reserve duty are now fighting.
They've been mobilized.
And so even the workforce has shifted to war.
So the costs are enormous.
Of course, the United States puts in billions and billions and billions of dollars.
And that's what Netanyahu counts on.
He counts on the US military and he counts on the US taxpayer.
But what he doesn't understand, in my opinion, is that Americans do not like They do not like what is mass murder in Gaza, a place that has just been leveled to ruins, to smithereens, where two million people used to live.
Who's going to pay for that recovery?
Well, is it going to be the U.S. taxpayer again?
Young people in the United States that show up, especially in the polls, are saying, we completely reject that.
But Netanyahu is counting on the fact that he can entice, if that's the right word, or drag or pull or yank the U.S. into a regional war with Iran right now and billions or tens of billions of dollars more to finance Israel through all of this.
I doubt that his calculation is right.
Wrong to say, you know, what do I know that he doesn't know?
But he was the one that said to the U.S. in 2002, oh, go in and invade Iraq.
It'll be great.
It'll be great, he told us.
And it's going to change the whole face of the Middle East in a great way.
So if you go back to what this guy has been saying for decades, it's...
What advantage would that have been to the Israelis?
The idea all along is Israel wants to be the regional power, unchallenged by anybody in the region.
And if that means crushing another powerful country, well, get the U.S. to do it.
And when Israel already 20, in this case 22 years ago, it was talking about Hamas and Hezbollah the same way.
And it was saying, well, we have to take out all of their supporters.
We have to take out Assad in Syria.
We have to take out Saddam because he's an unstable dictator.
He should have been not only defeated in 1990, but overthrown in regime change.
We need to take out Iran.
When we as Americans think back to 2003, we think of the Iraq War and all of the disaster that it caused us and the trillions of dollars of losses and debt that we incurred and all the veterans that came.
We think of that, but we don't see it quite as a sequence because, you know, it was eight years after going into Iraq that the second stage of the plan actually began with taking out the Syrian regime.
Why an eight-year gap?
Because according to the...
We got stuck in Iraq in a way we didn't expect because the idea originally of Netanyahu was bulldoze Iraq and then move on to bulldoze Syria, then move on to bulldoze Iran.
But the insurgency started, so we got stuck in Iraq.
Then Obama, in 2011, almost not known, not understood, hidden from view because it was a CIA operation.
We took on Syria.
The way we did it in that case was through proxies.
It was through literal jihadists that the United States funded through the CIA to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
By the way, complete debacle, a complete failure.
So when I say that Netanyahu's been selling us a line, he's been selling us a line for 25 years, which is reckless, which is costly, which is a failure, and he's doing it again.
And it looks like, you know, in his twilight days that Joe Biden's going to let Netanyahu do it again.
You know, every American president since George H.W. Bush has publicly stated they're in favor of the two-state solution.
Did any of them mean it?
Did any of them do anything to further the two-state solution?
So here's the deal on this.
The wars are being fought right now by Netanyahu to prevent And not a state of Palestine replacing Israel, but a state of Palestine living next to Israel in Palestinian lands now occupied by Israel.
So Israel controls the West Bank, it controls Gaza, it controls East Jerusalem, it controls the parts of the Golan Heights, all of which it captured 57 years ago.
The seven-year-old war occurred.
There was a UN Security Council resolution, 242, just after the war, that said that these are occupied lands, but they do not belong to Israel.
But part of the Israeli political scene, and Netanyahu became the leader of that over time, and it's represented by the main party.
Of this view, Likud, is we should never give back those conquered lands.
They are now permanently part of Israel.
And that now has been writing for 30 years while our borders were unsafe then, so we keep this land.
As if it's Israel's choice.
Yeah, we want it, we keep it, and so forth.
Whereas the world community has said, no.
This was itself in 67. A result of an unresolved conflict of two peoples living in this region, and they each need their political rights.
And so for more than 50 years now, the idea has been two states living side by side.
That's the international view.
That's the U.S. view, in quotation marks, as you say.
But Netanyahu and his political allies are completely, totally dead set against this.
So what they want is for the United States to fight a regional war, even one that could escalate to a world war so that Israel does not have to compromise on its claim on the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
I can't think of a more tragic and absurd The whole idea is tragic,
reckless, and absurd.
I'm not putting words in Netanyahu's mouth.
It's his exact program.
We're fools in the United States.
How universally accepted, but for Israel and the United States, notwithstanding what has come out of the mouths of U.S. presidents, how universally accepted is the concept and idea of a two-state solution?
universally accepted but for Israel and but for Israel.
The governing coalition.
We state it because everybody accepts that that is the end game.
But the way American politics works, I think everyone understands now, is that the Israel lobby is so powerful.
And the staffing, by the way, of the U.S. government is so pro-Israel.
Even one of our most senior people is an Israeli Defense Forces veteran.
Israeli-born, Israeli Defense Forces, one of the most senior people in the White House.
So we have an Israel lobby and we have a top-heavy arch-pro-Israel administration so that even though we mumble and the president does mumble and Blinken does mumble two-state solution, it doesn't matter.
Because Netanyahu says no, and then we say, okay, no.
And then Netanyahu says wider war, and we say, oh, we don't want a wider war.
Wider war!
And we go off to war.
So this is the reality.
Everybody understands there needs to be a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
And by the way, if they don't like each other, and there's good reason why they don't, really put peacekeepers in between.
Put a border in between.
This will never happen peaceably because of the makeup of the Israeli government.
It will only happen by an act of force, right?
Well, I don't think it's an act of force, but it will happen by an act of international legal imposition.
You could call it an act of force.
It would be imposed by the United Nations Security Council, which under the UN Charter has the power to enforce a peace.
And it's not to make a war.
It's to enforce a peace.
It's to put peacekeepers on the borders.
It's to tell Israel, sorry, this is now part of a state of Palestine.
Not to attack you, because the Security Council would surely, surely make arrangements that it would have disarmament.
Of Hamas and Hezbollah, that it would have agreements which are actually available with the Arab League countries, with Iran, with basically the whole world, that this would be a peace deal, not a new war, not crushing Israel.
It would be protecting Israel, but it would be saying to Israel, no, you do no longer rule over Israel.
But this has been the whole mission politically of Netanyahu and the Likud Party for decades.
He even writes, if we're tough, if we're strong, I'm paraphrasing of course, Eventually, the Arabs will just say, okay, we'll make normal relations.
So what Americans should understand is Israel's goal is brute force, of American brute force, American tax dollars, and then the idea that America will be able to conjole the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and others into a normalization.
Of relations with Israel.
And Netanyahu even said at the UN, of course, he explained that's his plan.
You know, so much of his planning over the last 30 years is sure nonsense.
And this, too, was a delusion.
But it was a delusion shared by some people in the U.S. government for a long time that Saudi Arabia would just go along and forget the Palestinian people and it's okay, the U.S. will give F-35s to Saudi Arabia and some And maybe a defense deal.
And you know what the Saudis have said?
And it could not be more crystal clear.
They have said, repeatedly now, we are ready to normalize relations with Israel, but on the basis of the two-state solution.
And Netanyahu has had the delusion.
again, you find it in his writing going back 30 years, that we'll wait it out and we'll get normalization of relations in the neighborhood despite having stopped the state.
of Palestine.
That's what this is all about.
What do you think is a realistic outcome, given the donor class power in the U.S., given the Israeli influence in the U.S. government, given the fact that with respect to Israel, it doesn't matter if Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins, given the religious fanaticism that permeates the Netanyahu government?
How is this likely to end?
Probably with one side triumphing over the other.
And if Iran gets involved, I don't think the triumphant side is going to be Israel.
And for further disaster.
After all, that's what this region has shown.
That's what Netanyahu's plans have amounted to for decades.
Nothing more than periodic explosions of mass bloodshed and killing.
He's one of the great failures of modern times.
But if you're not making a bet, but actually trying to find a solution, Then you come to a kind of different conclusion.
My conclusion is, first, that Israel can never be safe with the Netanyahu delusional plan.
Israel, not even Israel and the United States, is going to defeat Iran because Iran has Russia as an ally.
It's part of the BRICS.
It has China as a fellow BRICS member.
And Iran, 100 million people or so.
Come on.
With hypersonic missiles, with the powerful military, are we really going to have World War III over whether Israel is the dominant force in Gaza?
I don't think so.
So Israel needs to understand Netanyahu is leading Israel into the greatest insecurity of its modern history.
Complete diplomatic isolation and the potential of a devastating military defeat, even in days or weeks, because we know that that Iron Dome is not so iron and it's not so impenetrable and much worse could come sooner rather than later.
That's the first point.
Second, the United States is not served by this blind obedience to the Israel lobby.
And the American people are against what's happening.
They want peace.
They do not want a nuclear war over Israel's claim over Gaza or the occupied territories.
They don't see any case for going into another disastrous Middle East war of the kind that Netanyahu has been selling to the American Congress for years.
So I believe that the security state, the Pentagon and others.
Have wised up that Netanyahu has been selling a bill of goods for decades.
It's true the congressman shamefully stood up 58 times in standing ovations to this guy, but that's weeks before the U.S. election.
It's pitiful, but it's just weeks before the election, so it's the maximal period of influence.
November 6th starts to look a little bit different.
We can clear our eyes.
Okay, the election's over.
Now, what about U.S. security?
What about U.S. interests?
Now, again, I'm not against.
I'm not saying that it's to oppose Israel.
It's to oppose this concept of greater Israel as opposed to the two-state solution.
So on November 6th, we could start implementing what we say we are in favor of.
And the real point is, operationally, this can be done.
Through the UN, because in this case, there is no difference between China, Russia, the United States, Britain, and France over the basic outlook.
All five of the permanent members are for the two-state solution, very, very clearly, by the way.
So the Security Council could act.
What has stopped it from acting until now?
the US veto alone.
So if the US would wise up to US interests, We could actually move in the right direction.
So one thing is a probability.
The other thing is what we should do.
Jeff, a terrific analysis.
I could go through this with you for another hour, but I'll Of course.
Thank you very much.
I know you're traveling.
Thanks for your time.
I hope you can go back and visit with us again next week.
I'm pounding on it.
Thank you.
All the best.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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